It is difficult to speak with
excessive enthusiasm of the programming of a Salzburg Festival that included
both Carmen
and La bohème, though it would
subsequently be redeemed in part by a staging of Die Soldaten. That said, La
bohème proved more successful in almost every way than the relatively disappointing
Carmen seen earlier in the week.

Above all, this was a triumph
– perhaps predictable, but none the less worth of mention for that – for Daniele
Gatti and the Vienna Philharmonic. This was the first time during this year’s
Festival in which I had heard the VPO on top form – though it would not be the
last. The comparison may be odious but it made me realise quite what had been
missing in the Welsh
National Opera performance I had heard in June. Wagnerisms abound, of
course, but it takes a great conductor truly to relish them like this and to
transmute them into something quite personal to Puccini. Harmony and
orchestration are really what is most interesting about the composer’s work,
however naggingly memorable some of his melodies might be. Gatti presided over
an orchestral performance comparable to his Salzburg
Elektra a couple of years ago,
the sheer depth of tone resounding throughout the Grosses Festspielhaus as
impressive as the shimmering, translucent beauties of Puccini’s more
modernistic passages. Pacing was irreproachable, permitting the story and, most
important, the score to unfold as they would, rather than imposing an
irrelevant external framework upon them; unity was thereby enhanced rather than
detracted from.

Mimi (Anna Netrebko)

The cast was first-rate too.
Piotr Beczala has often sounded too Italianate, indeed too Puccini-like, in
much of the repertoire in which I have heard him; this is clearly where he is
most at home. The odd moment at which I thought less might have been more
aside, there was nothing for which to reproach him here and much to laud. If
ultimately Rodolfo is hardly the most interesting of roles, Beczala did what he
could with it, dynamic range and shading especially noteworthy. Likewise,
unsurprisingly, for Anna Netrebko’s Mimi, a star turn if ever there were one.
Netrebko truly inhabited the role, both more generally and with particular
reference to Damiano Michieletto’s production too. Many of the more celebrated
opera singers in this repertoire might have disdained a production that failed vulgarly
to flatter them ; Netrebko relished the contemporary setting and the emphasis
upon Mimi as disadvantaged. Her voice was in excellent repair, soaring
gloriously above the equally glorious orchestra. I had not come across Nino
Machaidze before, but her sexy, intelligent Musetta made me hope that I shall
do so again soon. Massimo Cavalletti’s Marcello put not a foot wrong; nor
indeed did any member of the ‘supporting’ cast. Choral singing was of the highest
standard throughout – an often overlooked aspect, crucial to a successful
performance of this opera.

Rodolfo (Piotr Beczala) and Mimi

In a sense, there was nothing
especially radical about Michieletto’s production, though given what most
houses present for La bohème, one
could say that even the very fact of moving the action to the twenty-first
century shows a thirst for adventure. (In this of all operas, there is surely
an imperative, albeit incessantly flouted, to rid a staging of every last ounce
of sentimentality.) Costumes alone, designed with flair by Carla Teti, would
doubtless have had self-appointed ‘traditionalists’ spluttering: a good in
itself, though hardly enough. Designs were splendid: spectacular in a good
rather than vulgar-Zeffirelli sense. The Paris street and metro map that
unfolded from time to time was really rather fun. Act Three’s sense of an urban,
frozen wasteland, replete with obligatory burger van, was chilling, in more
than one sense. Yet the production had
subtler virtues too, foremost amongst which should be accounted the space it
permitted one to question the work and assumptions one might hold about it. Whilst
I cannot (yet?) bring myself quite to accept the metatheatrical claims made for
the opera by some, however much more interesting they might make it, there was
to be discovered here, even if this were not the director’s intention, an
indictment of the selfishness of youth. Where Michieletto spoke of celebration,
it was equally possible, and indeed in my case more so, to recognise from
experience the shallow posing and disingenuousness of student-style
declarations of love, purpose, and principle. Mimi became a more interesting
victim, or perhaps better, the circumstances that brought about her fate became
sharpened, without turning the opera into something that it was not. I wonder
how this will be received in Shanghai, with whose Grand Theatre this is a
co-production.